Nominations for the putty medal are invited!!
Which single individual or idea has had the most detrimental effect on motoring since its dawn.
My nomination is the idea of putting water, gas and electricity mains under our roads so that every time they need to be repaired or replaced the road needs to be dug up and patched (badly).
Cheers, Sofa Spud
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Gordon Brown.
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whoever brought speed limits to Motorways!
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Ralph Nader. Intimidated pusillanimous GM by whipping up ignorant public feeling, thus killing off the only genuinely original US car design since the forties, the Chevrolet Corvair, an aircooled flat six at the rear but alas no Porsche. If the improved, non-oversteering, Yank-proof Corvair hadn't been, you know, yanked, who knows what route US car design might have taken? Nader passes for a hero in PC circles but not with me. Helped Bush win his first election too by splitting the Democrat vote in key areas.
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Oh yes, and on a local level car-bashing, road-narrowing, bump-encouraging, traffic-inhibiting, driver-enraging Ken Livingstone, red-faced mayor of some town or other whose name I forget.
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Traffic 'calming' and other driver irritants like misphased traffic lights, daft cycle lanes and other measures which make the roads a contentious rather than cooperative environment.
teabelly
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Most of the Transport Ministers we've ever had.
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>>Most of the Transport Ministers we've ever had.
Didn't they 'give' us motorways, dual carriageways, by-passes, etc. Without transport ministers we'd still be driving along rutted byways at the mercy of other vehicles that are never tested for roadworthiness and driven by drunks!!!
cheers, Sofa Spud
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Sofa,
anyone who ran BMC, BLMH, Leyland, Rover or whatever name they were trading under that week. And is it true that the Phoenix 4 have bid for GM?
John
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Absolutely, management and unions bribing each other and running the motor industry into the ground, never giving engineers a look-in... the only decent cheap(ish) car of the fifties, the Jowett Javelin, stifled by Austin-Morris as then was through their subsidiary Carbodies, while all the remaining companies, broke of course, were scooped up and asset-stripped... from the war to the present, a ghastly record, shameful in fact. Would have made Karl Marx really laugh.
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>>whoever brought speed limits to Motorways!
I think it was the late Barbara Castle, Labour's 1960's transport minister, who introduced the 70mph national limit. She was a non-driver, incidentally. Later, for a while in the 70's, there was a national 50mph speed limit that included motorways.
If the 70 limit hadn't been introduced when it was(it was experimental at first), someone else would have introduced a similar limit.
I remember, as a boy, being driven on motorways before the 70 mph limit, in cars doing 100+ mph. Doing a 'ton' seemed exciting at the time but the idea seems frightening on our crowded motorways now. Midland Red's express coaches used to travel at 80+ MPH on the M1 in the early 1960's and some were said to be capable of reaching 100 mph!
Sofa Spud
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I remember, as a boy, being driven on motorways before the 70 mph limit, in cars doing 100+ mph. Doing a 'ton' seemed exciting at the time but the idea seems frightening on our crowded motorways now. Midland Red's express coaches used to travel at 80+ MPH on the M1 in the early 1960's and some were said to be capable of reaching 100 mph! Sofa Spud
120mph before there were any motorways could be quite exciting in cars with fifties suspension and brakes, but surely 100mph is simply commonplace on motorways today. What's frightening about it, on roads designed for very high speeds? The possibility of getting caught and fined? Doesn't stop a small but widespread proportion of drivers from cruising at 100+.
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Please note this isn't a speed discussion thread.
smokie, BR Moderator
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Karl Marx, the role model of Livingstone and other Transport 2000 extremists.
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Doubt if Hizonner ever aspired to be a world-changing philosopher. But Marxists are highly critical of the 'bourgeois individualism' we motorists are thought to embody to a high degree. In the former Soviet Union Nikita Kruschev, for those who remember him, was said to be preparing quite an interesting system, with good trains, planes and buses but lots of small state-owned hire cars for people on holiday or visiting rural areas. Later Brezhnev, a car freak actually with a big collection, chose the capitalist road. Lada was the main result. But I have high hopes that China will do a bit better... a cheap super-frugal hybrid Model T for the 21st century. I can hope can't I?
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Listen
If the chinese ever get the "K series" engine cured of its gasket eating foibles they will deserve a medal
------------------------------
TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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Listen If the chinese ever get the "K series" engine cured of its gasket eating foibles they will deserve a medal
< Ex RF >
1,273,111,290 medals (2001 est.), and not putty ones either... but I wonder how high up their priority list that would be.
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Ernest Marples -
As Minister of Transport he brought in roadside yellow lines, parking meters and seat belts. It was also under Ernest Marples that Dr Richard Beeching was brought in and cut the British railway system down by two-thirds.
Talking of doing the ton on the M1, IIRC wasn't it Innes Ireland who was using it as a test track for his Le Mans car in the 60's?
I think it was not long afterwards that the limit was brought in.
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Ernest Marples - As Minister of Transport he brought in roadside yellow lines, parking meters and seat belts.
Something wrong with the notion of wearing seatbelts?
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>>whoever brought speed limits to Motorways!
According to www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?t=37232&...e it was neither Marples nor Castle but her predecessor.
Te words "Marples Must Go" were however visible on an M1 overbridge until the mid eighties when it went in the Brakspear to Berrygrove widening (end of the old two lane section).
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Most bosses of TV companies, who have been brainwashing the public for the past 5+ years with programmes on how you can move further away from where the work is, (eg Escape to the Country, Get a New Life etc), resulting in a growing number of super-commuters using the roads!
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not all of us can afford the high house prices where we work.Hence the super-commuter.How about parents driving their little darlings to school rather than walking(like most of us had to do in all weathers!)
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Whoever coined the phrase "overtaking lane"
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Don't you mean 'fast lane'?
--
I wasna fu but just had plenty.
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£designed by computer, built by robots " of some Fiat or other.
And programmed by idiots who had no idea of rust proofing.
madf
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GWS you are of course correct-doh!
BTW can you translate your sign off for us please?
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"I wasn't totally replete but I had an adequate sufficiency"
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No offence, but pithier and sounds better in demotic Caledonian...
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